Lyn Brown: New clause 1 would require the Government to publish an assessment of the impact and value for money of the Bill within a year of its coming into force. I hope the Bill will increase the speed at which new psychoactive substances are identified in the prison system, and I hope the system will be able to identify quickly where medicines are being misused before that leads to harm. I hope that more people who need treatment for their drug problems will be identified, and that access to treatment will therefore improve. I hope the performance and value for money of the testing provider will improve, because it has a new, clearer mission and renewed scrutiny from the Ministry and Parliament.
We all hope there are results, but whether the benefits of the Bill are realised will depend on policy decisions and their implementation by both the Prison Service and the outsourced testing provider. I hope the Minister will say something about that, particularly about the value for money of the existing contract and what is happening to ensure that the testing service provided will be fit for purpose by the time the Bill comes into force. For me, the most important aspect of this is ensuring that treatment improves, because we know there are currently failures in the system.
The most recent data show that 11% of people receiving substance misuse treatment in prison said they had a problem with NPSs. For many, they will not be the only substances they are misusing. That proportion has been rising; it was just 5% in 2015-16, but, given the very high estimates for use in some prisons, it is probably reasonable to expect that the numbers of NPS users in treatment will need to increase further.
Those figures suggest that currently, spice users may be disproportionately unlikely to be in treatment; as we know, some evidence suggests that around one third of those misusing drugs in prison last year were NPS users. Given that the tests have been inaccurate, the true proportion could be even higher. All that suggests that treatment rates for NPS in prisons are significantly lower than they need to be. In the community at large, just 8% of those known to the national drug treatment monitoring system had an NPS problem last year.
That is concerning, because it raises the possibility that there may not be the knowledge or established treatment options available for people leaving custody across the country. I would like to hear what recent assessments the Government have made of the proportion of NPS users in prison who are in treatment, what plans the Government have to improve access to treatment for  NPS users on the basis of the Bill, and what plans are in place to ensure that NPS users leaving custody have good access to treatment in the community.
The potential for a significant improvement in monitoring treatment and outcomes is there. Passing this Bill will be a good prompt for the Government to ensure that they provide the resources required for that to happen. If the Minister will commit to making a written statement on these matters in due course, after the Bill has commenced and enough time has passed for an assessment to be made, I will happily withdraw this new clause.
New clause 2 would require the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, as an expert body that has the central role in advising us on all issues relating to substance misuse, to publish a report to Parliament every six months on the substances that are getting into our prisons and their effects, the adequacy of the testing regime and any recommendations it might have as a result of its findings.
The Bill would remove the requirement for the Government to involve Parliament in the process for adding new substances to the testing regime. As a means to improve the responsiveness of testing, that is welcome, but it reduces the number of opportunities for and the level of scrutiny that we can apply to drug testing and to the way drug testing is used.
I believe we need to find a way to remedy that potential lack of transparency and scrutiny and to ensure that the results of anonymised prevalence testing are not kept as a secret for prison governors, HMPPS, managers and so on. We need to make maximum use of this information as a source of understanding of what is going on in our prisons, what is going wrong and how we might fix it.
On Second Reading, I raised the fact that both the branches and the national organisation of the Professional Trades Union for Prison, Correctional and Secure Psychiatric Workers—the POA—are currently denied access to results of the prevalence studies that already happen. I suspect that ensuring that staff know what substances were getting in, and what their effects are, would be helpful in improving responses to incidents. If there are regular, transparent reports, that will also help the prison system as a whole to respond to problems proactively, even if they have not yet shown up locally. It will aid the Justice Committee and external watchdogs such as Her Majesty’s inspectorate, independent monitoring boards and the prison and probation ombudsman to perform their essential work to improve the prison system.
Knowing how many prisoners are affected by the misuse of substances would also be helpful to probation services and local authorities, which will be responsible for meeting people’s needs, including their need for substance misuse services, once they are released. If we do not know what those needs are, how can we put plans in place to ensure that the right treatment will be accessible as soon as it is needed and where it is needed?
As we have heard, the Bill extends the testing regime to cover prescribed and pharmacy medicines that can be misused. On Second Reading, I raised the need to ensure that the results of testing are shared with healthcare partners, because understanding what substances are out there will help them to prioritise resources and ensure that the right training is in place. We also need to ensure that prisoners who test positive for a substance  are not penalised if they have a genuine medical need, but that their need is recognised and properly and adequately responded to. Sometimes, people who cannot access the right healthcare quickly resort to self-medication, even if they do not have a legal prescription or they risk their health in doing so. That happens with vulnerable people in the community and, as we know, in prison.
Timely and transparent reports on the outcomes of prevalence testing would keep us informed about another essential aspect, which is how illegal drugs get into our prisons in the first place. As my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, Southgate said, there has finally been some progress on that in recent years as a result of new internal body scanners, along with extra staffing and metal detectors, being introduced at the prisons with the largest number of people moving in and out regularly. Obviously, we hope that progress continues but, again, we need to do more than hope. If we had a clear basis for monitoring where different substances are getting in, and if regular reports were being published, it would help us to ensure that there was accountability in the system to drive that progress forward.
The Minister will know that there are calls for further investment in technology to shut down routes into prison. Devices are available to prisons to detect packages being smuggled within the body, but anything that can be concealed underneath or within clothing can be found only in a manual search. That is particularly difficult with drugs such as spice that can be soaked in sheets of paper or an extra layer of clothing and transported into prison that way. Although the technology available has significantly improved, it can be improved further.
One option is millimetre wave scanners, which hon. Members may have experienced at many UK airports. I am told that they can detect hidden items more accurately than a manual search. They can reduce the close contact required and possibly make visiting more comfortable for law-abiding family members. In a written parliamentary answer, the Minister told me that the Government do not currently believe that the scanners “meet…operational requirements”, but I would like to hear more about what the flaws are and whether it is rather a cost-benefit issue.
Finally, it would be remiss of me not to mention the pandemic that is still raging all around us. One of the consequences of covid, I understand, is that the mandatory drug testing programme was shut down during the first wave. Another consequence is that two of the biggest routes for drugs into prisons—on prisoners as they enter, or on prison visitors—were, and are, heavily restricted.
Surely, there must be lessons to be learned from whether access to harmful substances has or has not reduced, which should tell us something helpful about targeting efforts to shut down access to drugs in future. Likewise, we should be able to learn lessons about the connection between mandatory testing and treatment, and between testing and disciplinaries, from the extraordinary period we are in. I say gently that I do not think the Minister engaged with that point on Second Reading, so I am really hoping that today she is enthusiastically wanting to say more.